More than 1.5 billion people lack access to electricity. This fraction of the global population is off-grid, and is referred to as the base of the socioeconomic pyramid. The “base of the pyramid” includes more than 4 billion people that spend up to 30% of household income on expensive batteries and low-quality, dangerous fuel-based sources of light, such as kerosene, to meet their energy needs. Families in these households inhale toxic kerosene fumes on a nightly basis. Moreover, children struggle to study because they rely on using dim kerosene light.
Many off-grid households in these markets own cellular phones that are commonly referred to as “feature phones” (e.g., Nokia brick phones), which cannot run third party software applications. Off-grid “base of the pyramid” families may travel hours to charge their consumer electronics, such as cellular phones, from the nearest source of grid electricity, often paying very high prices to do so. Distributed solar energy products can provide in-home lighting and power resources to solve this problem; however, off-grid “base of the pyramid” customers rarely have enough cash on hand at one time to purchase their own solar home system outright at retail prices.
Traditional leasing or cash collection programs for solar home energy systems have proven too costly or difficult to manage to effectively scale. The growth of mobile money platforms and extensive cellular infrastructure throughout many off-grid markets presents an opportunity to leverage this infrastructure to inexpensively and securely provide financing for solar home systems at scale, using pay-as-you-go (PAYG) technology. However, methods for communicating payments and diagnostic data for PAYG electronic devices tend to be unsecure and unreliable. Accordingly, a need exists for a secure way to provide light and energy to “base of the pyramid” households with a Pay-As-You-Go pricing structure.
Mobile money payment systems are known. For example, U.S. Patent Publication No. 2011/0270764 describes a system for performing electronic transactions using a point of sales device and a user's cellular phone. However, this application does not describe a customer using a cable to physically connect a jack on an energy device or appliance to an audio jack on a mobile phone for transferring data, or for management and monitoring of the energy device. This application also does not describe the customer using the same jack on the energy device to accept a solar panel plug, or other energy source, to charge a battery in the energy device. Moreover, this application does not describe a network of agents that can facilitate transactions between multiple customers and a service provider.